'Anonymous' Plans DDoS Attack on RIAA on Friday

The clandestine group known as "Anonymous" plans to target the RIAA's Web site Friday night as a part of "Operation Payback," described as retribution for the shutdown of the LimeWire peer-to-peer client.

The clandestine group known as "Anonymous" plans to target the RIAA's Web site Friday night as a part of "Operation Payback," described as retribution for the shutdown of the LimeWire peer-to-peer client.

The group, which also reportedly includes members of the "/b/" bulletin board at 4chan.org, plans to launch the attack at 4:00 PM EST on Friday, Oct. 29, according to a posting on the Operation Payback Web site.

A spokeswoman for the RIAA declined to comment.

On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered that Lime Wire LLC shut off the LimeWire client from Gnutella, a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Lime Wire blocked access by covertly installing a centralized "kill switch" into recent versions of the LimeWire client. Other alternatives to LimeWire remain, however, including older versions that lack the kill switch. And, since the LimeWire software is open source, other developers could theoretically "sanitize" it by altering the source code, although the court order also barred LimeWire from displaying the source code as well.

The court order, originally sealed but now published on the LimeWire Web site, also says that LimeWire must create a new version of the software that includes a copyright filter, which it must submit to the court and to the record labels for approval. The court and the labels have 30 days to test and approve the new version before Lime Wire distributes it, presumably with a forced upgrade.

A number of record labels - including Arista, BMG, Sony, and Warner Bros. - are listed as plaintiffs in the Lime Wire suit, and not the RIAA itself. But the RIAA, which represents the music industry, has been viewed as the agency responsible for coordinating legal actions against file-sharing services and those users who have used them, including Jammie Thomas-Rasset, whose third trial to determine the fines she must pay for illegally sharing 24 songs will kick off in early November. In total, across two trials, the fines the court has assessed have ranged from $54,000 to $1.92 million.

LimeWire's shutdown, plus the RIAA's ongoing campaign against piracy, prompted the decision to launch the attack on the RIAA's IP address, according to the site. The Operation Payback site included a note, dated Oct. 26, urging readers to publicize the site's position. "People need to be aware of what is going on," the site says.

The flyer advertising the effort was also posted on the Anonymous page of "Encyclopedia Dramatica" at press time, and a message urging people to visit the site was posted to the comments section of the PCMag.com story on the LimeWire closure.

According to a manifesto published on the Operation Payback Web site, the group set out to fight back against what the group called an abuse of copyright "to assure a steady flow of income".

"The piracy witch-hunt is not to stop piracy. It is not to secure the artist's income; it is just another business model allowing a group of lawyers to do what they do best: defend their statements with law," the group said. "They found a way to make it legit to financially rape exploit children. And the entertainment industry associations even openly stated that they don't intend to share the money from this exploitation with the artists. Instead, they intend to use it to start even more lawsuits. This is the extreme opposite of what copyright was intended for. Judge and jury must be brought to understanding that the entertainment industries are not interested in stopping piracy, but exploiting it. This is what kills creativity. This is what discourages the real artists."

According to a flyer posted on the site, the Payback group advised that "Prank Calls and black faxes recommended for maximum Payback". The site also published the home address of the RIAA chief executive, Mitchell B. Bainwol, plus the phone number and fax numbers of the RIAA.

"[W]e started with Denial of Service attacks; we started the protest of the future by targeting websites of lobbying groups and law firms that abuse copyright law. We simply will no longer be ignored," the site said. "While the operation moves forward with new actions such as defacing websites, people have realized that defacement is not the only thing that can be done. People started protesting on their own: bomb threats, prank calls, hacking websites, and who knows what else. Several media outlets are reporting about the operation distancing itself from these splinter attacks, like the attack on individual artists who have this 'Sue! Sue! Sue some more!' attitude.

"But protesting is done regardless whether a core group approves what happens or not," the site added. "Operation Payback is the movement, the protest itself, the moving force that tries, where we uncover how deep the copyright exploitation goes nowadays. That movement cannot be turned away, stopped, concluded. As long as anybody continues to fight for this cause, the operation will exist."

The 4chan/Anonymous group has been extremely effective taking down other targeted Web sites, including Hustler.com and Anti-piracy.fi, according to the PandaLabs blog. On Oct. 28, the group took down Anti-piracy.fi for 20 hours and 13 minutes, with 119 service interruptions; Hustler.com's uptime was interrupted with 2 hours and 20 minutes of total downtime.

The Operation Payback site also included links to DDoS tools, with instructions.

The site also posted a small frequently-asked questions (FAQ) list, including one that asked, "Will I get caught?"

"Chances are next to zero because we are so many doing it," the site added in a response. "You can simply deny knowing what they are talking about, or saying you have been infected by a virus (botnet). However, if you try to do this alone chances are MUCH higher that you get caught."

About the Author

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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